I have never watched Discovery. No plans to.
My wife and I subscribed to Paramount Plus the last couple of weeks and we watched the first season of Picard. For context, I'm a lifelong Trekker. Fell in love with the original crew feature films when I started watching them in the 80s, TNG was "my crew," DS9 is my favorite Trek series. I watched some of Voyager, and a little bit of Enterprise. I liked them okay, but much less than DS9, TNG and the original crew. That said, I did not really care for how TNG translated to the big screen. After Generations, which was pretty good, I thought the subsequent TNG films were worse and worse. My wife has seen the Trek films, sporadic episodes, and she thinks its all okay. She's a sci-fi fan, just not a huge Trek fan.
I say all that in preface to our reaction to Picard. Put simply - the plot was all over the place. I know some folks likely haven't seen it, so I'll try to be vague. But while I really liked the premise of where Picard was, what was troubling him, and how he as a person got further back to what we all remember, all the side points and plots were all over the map, many of them being unnecessary. The new characters (particularly the one that calls him JL) were all just half-baked and silly to me. The...(again, trying to be vague) "lets throw these folks in there" mentality of the first season was silly. The funny thing is, the on screen chemistry between Picard and those familiar folks was perfect. But it just felt like things were slapped in there. The half baked storyline of the...young Romulan...got introduced, and never really had a chance to properly develop.
Ultimately, the resulting end of season 1, and what happened with Picard was...not surprising. I called it early in the series as events unfolded and that "condition" kept being mentioned and what could fix it. And it made sense. But everything to get there...just so many unnecessary things. I know Paramount is desperate to make Star Trek popular again with the masses, particularly given what Star Wars has done in recent years for Disney. But trotting a legendary character like Picard out there, and then haphazardly throwing in so much garbage (did we really need what's her name vaping? I'm no prude, and have a bad mouth myself, but was all the vulgarity necessary? Trek never needed that before, etc.), it really left me annoyed.
The ending with...Picard's main hangup, I thought was...fitting. But how they got there left a lot to be desired, IMO.
We won't be watching Season 2.